Winterwatch comes to an end: How I will miss Chris Packham

A televisual feast came to an end this week. Alas, no more Winterwatch. What, you ask, that mind-numbing beaver nibbling? But it is so much more! As in fact is beaver nibbling. The animal has a habit of eating its own poo which I now know is called, coprophagia. So there. It wasn’t the animals I was watching though, Winterwatch was all about Chris Packham.

Packham reckons, if attacked by a vicious beast, he would be the one to stand up and defend the rest of the Winterwatch crowd because of his ‘breadth of experience . . . my risk analysis is black and white. When I’m working with animals that are potentially dangerous I always have a strategy about how I’d react if something went wrong. I don’t find it daunting.’ Which makes him sound rather more Rambo than rambler.

If you couldn’t get enough of watching small animals in the dark there was the later follow up Winterwatch Unstrung with its suggested promise of nighttime naughtiness.

In fact when asked if he’d ever consider I’m a Celebrity it was a firm no, due to the way the show ‘stereotypes’ spiders and bugs which makes him depressed, and on putting contestants into a tank with a crocodile with its jaws tied together: ‘I mean, they’re not even dangerous.’ Packham is meant for more than this.

Sadly there wasn’t much chance of seeing Packham in action. Not against the Hawfinch he spotted, or Michaela Strachan though she did ‘drag me off to a den’ he told viewers. He didn’t think there was much chance of seeing any badgers once there, he knew what Michaela was really after. Well she better back off.

I don’t know why Packham doesn’t present everything. He even made a pine martin peeing on a branch one of the best things I’ve ever seen EVER. I thought I might die with joy as he slowly and silently approached a pigeon fancier (spottable on your common park bench) in central London. Twitching in the park could be an entire spin off series. Sir Attenborough could learn a thing or two.

If you couldn’t get enough of watching small animals in the dark there was the later follow up Winterwatch Unstrung with its suggested promise of nighttime naughtiness. I bet Chris Packham the mammal-loving maverick could be nasty if he wanted to. He probably keeps it hidden beneath his anorak, with Bill Oddie.

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